Week 4 Observations

It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to

When McCaffrey scores 47, and Kittle not even two.

Wish I could just wake up and it not be true

But it is, oh, it is

Apologies to Oliver Anthony, but I’m annoyed.

Why do the Cowboys have to keep getting defensive touchdowns such that Dak doesn’t need to throw and CeeDee Lamb gets only six targets? Game flow variance is real, but it can’t be game after game. And they didn’t throw to him even when they were losing last week in Arizona. Just play a normal game where your best receiver gets 12 targets, FFS.

I have Prescott and Brock Purdy in the Primetime, and I think I’m now 4-for-4 in starting whichever winds up scoring fewer points.

I could bitch about 100 things here, but I won’t. Maybe 10 or 12 at most.

. . .

One thing I just realized in 2023, 45 years too late, is maybe I should let go of my attachment to outcomes, especially when it comes to all matters NFL. It’s just not a beast you can tame and bend to your will. Why do I watch games for hours on end trying to telekinetically control what’s on my TV screen and feeling enraged upon discovering I in fact do not have this power?

. . .

Like last week, I’m not going over every game — just throwing out some things that occurred to me. I asked the boss of Real Man Sports if it was okay to say whatever I felt like here, and he gave me the green light. (The boss of Real Man Sports don’t say no, he’s too busy sayin’ “Yeah!”)

Tua and the Dolphins remind me a little bit of Kurt Warner and the Greatest Show On Turf Rams. Fast release, accurate throws, quick decisions, and lots of playmakers once the ball is in their hands. But also Mike Martz (the offensive coordinator) didn’t care much for pass protection, which was a problem when the ball didn’t come out right away.

I dropped the Ravens defense for the Texans in one league because I thought the massage guy was playing for the Browns. The Texans did pretty well too, but it cost me five points.

I also wanted to change my Browns pick to the Ravens in the picking pool, but discovered all picks lock five minutes prior to the start of the day’s first game. The stupid London game had already started unfortunately, so the pick was locked. At first I was annoyed by this, but I see the point of the rule — if you didn’t lock all the picks, then everyone would have to hustle to switch them if there were ever breaking news before the late or Sunday night games, and you would never know peace. Some hustle-bitch would always have the edge on you because he remembered mid-day to tweak the picks in your low-stakes pool. So I prefer it this way even though in this instance I was that hustle-bitch.

Speaking of which, the London game is just a Milgram experiment to see whether you’d chain yourself to the sofa for 14 hours because the schedule says so.

Of course when I dropped Richie Grant in my IDP league he gets 11 tackles. Why would he not make all the tackles now that he’s no longer on my roster?

I’ve asked this before, but what is the purpose of this current Patriots roster? They have no playmakers, Mac Jones should probably be a competent backup somewhere, why bother? It’s almost as if Bill Belichick is repaying the devil by having to coach this pointless team in perpetuity.

When Desmond Ridder loses the job, Falcons fans (and Kyle Pitts owners) will say “Good Ridderance.”

I really did start Miles (Kilometers) Sanders over De’Von Achane in a league. I think that was the move that made me realize it was time to stop being attached. Sanders had 13 carries, while Achane had only eight so my process was good, right?

I feel a little cheated in only getting a push on the Bears plus three at home. It took a defensive TD (scored by Jonathan Cooper, the DE I picked up in that same IDP league fortunately) to cap a 21-point comeback.

Jaleel McLaughlin (5-9, 183, 4.43 40) got extra work when Javonte Williams went down and looked like he was shot out of a cannon. He’s yet another of the new breed of small, lightning quick running backs that are taking over the league. Travis Etienne, Kenneth Walker and Bijan Robinson really aren’t that small, but Jahmyr Gibbs, De’Von Achane and even McCaffrey, Tony Pollard, James Cook, Raheem Mostert and Austin Ekeler are all low BMI speed guys. Both wideouts and backs are getting smaller the last five years.

Stefon Diggs got 36 NFFC points on seven targets. Josh Allen got 47.7 on 25 attempts and four rushes.

It’s annoying with Saquon down, I’m forced to use the CEH. My real reserve running backs are Damien Harris (why did they bring in Latavius Murray’s carcass) and Rashaad (“pound foolish”) Penny. Last week it worked out, this week not so much. I might have to plunk down some FAAB on 183-pound McLaughlin.

Isiah Pacheco finally got RB1 work (20 carries three targets) while CEH and Jerick McKinnon barely touched the ball. I didn’t think he had much of a ceiling, but he does if that continues.

QB1 played pretty well, made some nice throws, used his legs. He’s not dead yet, and it was nice to see Garrett Wilson get 14 targets, albeit mostly short ones.

Would it kill the Ravens to let the GOAT attempt a field-goal? I got one point from a Younghoe in two leagues and four from Tucker in my other three. This is the first year I’m regretting paying up for Tucker both because the Ravens go for it on fourth down all the time and also because half the league is drilling 57-yard field goals like they’re PATs.

I doubled my Kyren Williams-Cam Akers bet with Alan Seslowsky since I didn’t think Williams was good or long for the job, and Williams proceeds to score twice in the first quarter and finish with more than 100 years. It was only from $20 to $40 though.

I had Anthony Richardson in over Kirk Cousins the week Cousins went bananas against the Eagles and Richardson got concussed, and I had Cousins this week when Richardson went bananas and Cousins did little. Lineup setting is the worst part of fantasy football, and you either listen to Krishnamurti or wind up in the abyss. I’m spending too much time in the abyss.

Maybe Richardson is just a much faster Josh Allen. (Allen was raw as a rookie too.)

I was on Houston this week. Sometimes you sell high after they crush a team like the Jaguars, as most teams regress to the mean, but other times a surprise upset signals a new baseline, especially when the team got to add the No. 2 and 3 overall picks in this year’s draft. (Not every team drafts like the Chargers, using a first rounder on someone they don’t intend to feature this year even after the guy he’s replacing (Mike Williams) is out for the year.)

I compared Baker Mayfield to Jared Goff — left-for-dead former first overall pick that’s really a solid league-average QB under decent conditions — and so far Mayfield has done his part. People really overrate the importance of the QB position for two reasons: (1) They attribute the conditons under which he plays to the QB himself; and (2) They compare QBs to a very low replacement level backup entering the game without sufficient reps, comfort in the system or display of basic NFL-level competence. That’s why when the QB goes down, the spread moves seven points. But you take a seasoned pro like Mayfield, Goff, Andy Dalton, Derek Carr or Jimmy Garoppolo, put good players and a good system around them, and there’s not a world of difference between them. Hell, the 49ers are making Brock Purdy look like Joe Montana right now.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I didn’t go all-in for Puka Nacua after Week 1. The Red Zone channel displayed a graphic showing he broke the first-four-games record for catches among rookies with 39, but Scott Hanson didn’t really emphasize that No. 2 (Anquan Boldin) had only 30! So Nacua didn’t just break it, he annihilated it. If someone hit 100 home runs next year, you wouldn’t just say he “broke” Barry Bonds’ record and leave it at that. (Not that rookie-receptions-over-the-first-four-games has the same importance as the single season home run record, but you get the point.)

The Football Team always plays the Eagles tough, just like the Bills and Josh Allen own the Dolphins. Some things are reliable — until they’re not.

The Eagles late-game clock management and the Team’s decision to go to OT rather than win it with the two-point conversion have been talked about enough, so I won’t go into detail here. I’ll just say Riverboat Ron has gravitated to the penny slots in his old age.

I didn’t watch much of Bengals-Titans, though I had the Bengals -2.5 in one of my pools (my only loss in that one as I did better this week.) What a disaster if you stacked Bengals this year.